Self-confidence and self-esteem – the real way to get it

“9 Self-assuring Affirmations for When You Need a Little Boost,”boasted the headline. I clicked on it hoping I might learn something new. I didn’t. It was a series of nine little pictures with clever sayings on them. The “writer” provided no content beyond a short introductory paragraph that ended with this: “If you’re looking for a little encouragement, check out the self-assuring affirmations below. Then take on the world with the knowledge that you’re capable of anything.”

I’m capable of anything? I don’t think so. I proved that on Friday when I played basketball with a bunch of seniors and tried to jump to get a rebound. I can’t jump much over one or two inches anymore. I could affirm myself able to slam-dunk the basketball from here to eternity and it simply will not happen.

I decided to read the affirmations anyway because who doesn’t need little encouragement from time to time. As I read them two words stood out: I and ME. One of those two words was a part of every affirmation. It made me think, do we really get self-esteem by talking to ourselves or do we get self esteem by accomplishing a goal, working hard on an important project, or by helping someone in need?

So here’s what I did. I looked at each of the nine affirmations that were supposed to give us a boost and I turned some of them upside down. By so doing, I think I have made them right-side-up. See what YOU think!

The first affirmation was, “This challenge will bring out the best in me.”No doubt challenges bring out the best in us. When pushed beyond what we think we can endure or beyond what we think we can accomplish, we often surprise ourselves at what we really can accomplish, given the opportunity and the motivation to get it done.

Turn that affirmation up-sided-down and, instead of saying, “This challenge will bring out the best in me,” declare, “How can I help you with the challenge you face?” Do you see the difference? One focuses on me and my challenge, and the other focuses on how I can help someone else through their difficulty. Which one of creates the most self esteem? The one that is only a declaration about me, or the one that gets me involved in someone else’s life?

The second affirmation said, “I will see the best in myself.” Once again I understand the affirmation and that many people often put themselves down. However, when you turn that affirmation up-side-down, it takes the focus off of me, myself and I and puts it on the other person. Instead of “I will see the best in myself,” declare, “I will see the best in every person I meet today.”

Think about it: what if you said something nice to every person you met today? What if you handed out compliments to the people you do business with or the neighbors next door or the people who wait on you at the mall? It is always better to focus on other people rather than to gaze at your navel and think that by so doing you will achieve a sense of self-worth or enter into a meditative state of sublime peace.

Affirmation number 3: “I will thrive when life throws me a curveball!” Turn it up-side-down and it would say, “I’m here to help YOU when life throws YOU a curveball.”Don’t you think your self-esteem will rise when your life is about serving others rather than just serving yourself?

The fourth affirmation said, “I love who I am becoming.” Whoa. Wait a minute. Wouldn’t falling in love with “who I am becoming” depend a little bit on “who I am becoming?” I recall times in my life when I was becoming a real jerk and NOBODY loved that, especially me. So let’s just forget that affirmation altogether.

The fifth affirmation said, “I am worthy of this opportunity.”Like the previous affirmation, that would depend on the opportunity, would it not? Fact is we have all been offered so-called opportunities that were really traps or frauds or snake oil. I do like the focus on opportunity rather than the popular focus on entitlement or privilege that some people think they have because they are a certain color or age or profession or rank or member of a certified victim class.

The sixth and seventh affirmations are similar: “I have the power to achieve my goals,” and “I know I can do this.”Goals are good and the power to achieve them is within you, but I have a question for you: Have you ever used your power to help someone else achieve their goals? That might bring you a great big surge of pride, self-esteem and self-confidence, not because you achieved your goals but because you helped someone else achieve theirs.

The eighth affirmation said, “I have so many good qualities to share with the world.” Well aren’t you special! Do you see what I mean about how these affirmations are so “I, me and my” focused? They are starting to make me ill.

The ninth affirmation we are supposed to start using to give ourselves a boost is this: “I am always growing and developing.” OK great, so here’s what I recommend on this one: Grow and develop a sincere interest in other people and stop gazing at your naval. Get out of you cocoon, get involved in something that focuses NOT on helping you become all that you can be, but helps someone else become all that they can be.You will find more joy, more satisfaction, and more self-esteem when you focus on others than you will ever find by focusing on yourself.

Artist and art critic John Ruskin who lived in the 1800s wrote a sentence that summarizes the danger of focusing only on me, myself and I. He wrote, “When a man is wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.”

Dr. Ron Ross is a publisher, author, speaker, radio personality residing in Loveland, Colorado. He is the author of two published books and several e-books. He is the host of Tidbits Radio on 1310KFKA-AM and on CastleRockRadio.com. He writes a weekly motivational and inspirational column that is published in a variety of newspapers.

Blockchain. A day doesn’t seem to go by without seeing articles and discussions about the technology. According to PwC executive Seamus Cushley, approximately $1.4B has been invested in blockchain just last year. In Gartner’s recent hype cycle for emerging technologies, blockchain is approaching the peak. It is considered by Gartner as one of the ‘Key platform-enabling technologies to track.’ While there is a lot of ‘hype vs reality’ discussions going on, there is no arguing that blockchain is b...

In his keynote at 18th Cloud Expo, Andrew Keys, Co-Founder of ConsenSys Enterprise, provided an overview of the evolution of the Internet and the Database and the future of their combination – the Blockchain. Andrew Keys is Co-Founder of ConsenSys Enterprise. He comes to ConsenSys Enterprise with capital markets, technology and entrepreneurial experience. Previously, he worked for UBS investment bank in equities analysis. Later, he was responsible for the creation and distribution of life settle...

DevOps is under attack because developers don’t want to mess with infrastructure. They will happily own their code into production, but want to use platforms instead of raw automation. That’s changing the landscape that we understand as DevOps with both architecture concepts (CloudNative) and process redefinition (SRE).
Rob Hirschfeld’s recent work in Kubernetes operations has led to the conclusion that containers and related platforms have changed the way we should be thinking about DevOps and...

The need for greater agility and scalability necessitated the digital transformation in the form of following equation: monolithic to microservices to serverless architecture (FaaS). To keep up with the cut-throat competition, the organisations need to update their technology stack to make software development their differentiating factor.
Thus microservices architecture emerged as a potential method to provide development teams with greater flexibility and other advantages, such as the abili...

Product connectivity goes hand and hand these days with increased use of personal data. New IoT devices are becoming more personalized than ever before.
In his session at 22nd Cloud Expo | DXWorld Expo, Nicolas Fierro, CEO of MIMIR Blockchain Solutions, will discuss how in order to protect your data and privacy, IoT applications need to embrace Blockchain technology for a new level of product security never before seen - or needed.

Leading companies, from the Global Fortune 500 to the smallest companies, are adopting hybrid cloud as the path to business advantage. Hybrid cloud depends on cloud services and on-premises infrastructure working in unison. Successful implementations require new levels of data mobility, enabled by an automated and seamless flow across on-premises and cloud resources. In his general session at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Tevis, an IBM Storage Software Technical Strategist and Customer Solution Architec...

Coca-Cola’s Google powered digital signage system lays the groundwork for a more valuable connection between Coke and its customers. Digital signs pair software with high-resolution displays so that a message can be changed instantly based on what the operator wants to communicate or sell. In their Day 3 Keynote at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Chambers, Global Group Director, Digital Innovation, Coca-Cola, and Vidya Nagarajan, a Senior Product Manager at Google, discussed how from store operations and ...

"As we've gone out into the public cloud we've seen that over time we may have lost a few things - we've lost control, we've given up cost to a certain extent, and then security, flexibility," explained Steve Conner, VP of Sales at Cloudistics,in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

Blockchain is a shared, secure record of exchange that establishes trust, accountability and transparency across business networks. Supported by the Linux Foundation's open source, open-standards based Hyperledger Project, Blockchain has the potential to improve regulatory compliance, reduce cost as well as advance trade. Are you curious about how Blockchain is built for business? In her session at 21st Cloud Expo, René Bostic, Technical VP of the IBM Cloud Unit in North America, discussed the b...

The use of containers by developers -- and now increasingly IT operators -- has grown from infatuation to deep and abiding love. But as with any long-term affair, the honeymoon soon leads to needing to live well together ... and maybe even getting some relationship help along the way. And so it goes with container orchestration and automation solutions, which are rapidly emerging as the means to maintain the bliss between rapid container adoption and broad container use among multiple cloud host...

In his session at 21st Cloud Expo, Michael Burley, a Senior Business Development Executive in IT Services at NetApp, described how NetApp designed a three-year program of work to migrate 25PB of a major telco's enterprise data to a new STaaS platform, and then secured a long-term contract to manage and operate the platform.
This significant program blended the best of NetApp’s solutions and services capabilities to enable this telco’s successful adoption of private cloud storage and launching ...

You know you need the cloud, but you’re hesitant to simply dump everything at Amazon since you know that not all workloads are suitable for cloud. You know that you want the kind of ease of use and scalability that you get with public cloud, but your applications are architected in a way that makes the public cloud a non-starter. You’re looking at private cloud solutions based on hyperconverged infrastructure, but you’re concerned with the limits inherent in those technologies.

Imagine if you will, a retail floor so densely packed with sensors that they can pick up the movements of insects scurrying across a store aisle. Or a component of a piece of factory equipment so well-instrumented that its digital twin provides resolution down to the micrometer.

"Since we launched LinuxONE we learned a lot from our customers. More than anything what they responded to were some very unique security capabilities that we have," explained Mark Figley, Director of LinuxONE Offerings at IBM, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 21st Cloud Expo, held Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

Is advanced scheduling in Kubernetes achievable?Yes, however, how do you properly accommodate every real-life scenario that a Kubernetes user might encounter? How do you leverage advanced scheduling techniques to shape and describe each scenario in easy-to-use rules and configurations? In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Oleg Chunikhin, CTO at Kublr, answered these questions and demonstrated techniques for implementing advanced scheduling. For example, using spot instances and co...

Blockchain. A day doesn’t seem to go by without seeing articles and discussions about the technology. According to PwC executive Seamus Cushley, approximately $1.4B has been invested in blockchain just last year. In Gartner’s recent hype cycle for emerging technologies, blockchain is approaching the peak. It is considered by Gartner as one of the ‘Key platform-enabling technologies to track.’ Whil...

The nature of test environments is inherently temporary—you set up an environment, run through an automated test suite, and then tear down the environment. If you can reduce the cycle time for this process down to hours or minutes, then you may be able to cut your test environment budgets considerably.
The impact of cloud adoption on test environments is a valuable advancement in both cost saving...

In his keynote at 18th Cloud Expo, Andrew Keys, Co-Founder of ConsenSys Enterprise, provided an overview of the evolution of the Internet and the Database and the future of their combination – the Blockchain. Andrew Keys is Co-Founder of ConsenSys Enterprise. He comes to ConsenSys Enterprise with capital markets, technology and entrepreneurial experience. Previously, he worked for UBS investment b...

DevOps is under attack because developers don’t want to mess with infrastructure. They will happily own their code into production, but want to use platforms instead of raw automation. That’s changing the landscape that we understand as DevOps with both architecture concepts (CloudNative) and process redefinition (SRE).
Rob Hirschfeld’s recent work in Kubernetes operations has led to the conclusi...

Decentralization of everything, the great new idea of which the web can’t stop babbling, might still seem a bit utopian if you inspect it closely.
Yes, blockchains are likely to reshape our economy, or a huge part of it, and benefit considerably those who are currently unbanked.
They might also facilitate the creation of rating/reputation systems that are not controlled by any single entity and ...

The need for greater agility and scalability necessitated the digital transformation in the form of following equation: monolithic to microservices to serverless architecture (FaaS). To keep up with the cut-throat competition, the organisations need to update their technology stack to make software development their differentiating factor.
Thus microservices architecture emerged as a potential ...

Product connectivity goes hand and hand these days with increased use of personal data. New IoT devices are becoming more personalized than ever before.
In his session at 22nd Cloud Expo | DXWorld Expo, Nicolas Fierro, CEO of MIMIR Blockchain Solutions, will discuss how in order to protect your data and privacy, IoT applications need to embrace Blockchain technology for a new level of product se...

Leading companies, from the Global Fortune 500 to the smallest companies, are adopting hybrid cloud as the path to business advantage. Hybrid cloud depends on cloud services and on-premises infrastructure working in unison. Successful implementations require new levels of data mobility, enabled by an automated and seamless flow across on-premises and cloud resources. In his general session at 21st...

Coca-Cola’s Google powered digital signage system lays the groundwork for a more valuable connection between Coke and its customers. Digital signs pair software with high-resolution displays so that a message can be changed instantly based on what the operator wants to communicate or sell. In their Day 3 Keynote at 21st Cloud Expo, Greg Chambers, Global Group Director, Digital Innovation, Coca-Col...

"As we've gone out into the public cloud we've seen that over time we may have lost a few things - we've lost control, we've given up cost to a certain extent, and then security, flexibility," explained Steve Conner, VP of Sales at Cloudistics,in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 20th Cloud Expo, held June 6-8, 2017, at the Javits Center in New York City, NY.

Development cycles are being squeezed into tighter timeframes than ever before - days, hours and even minutes. Organizations that fail to keep up will find themselves behind and struggling to keep pace. However, DevOps isn’t the hurdle that it may initially seem, and if an organization develops a proper strategy the obstacles to adopting DevOps can be successfully overcome.

Blockchain is a shared, secure record of exchange that establishes trust, accountability and transparency across business networks. Supported by the Linux Foundation's open source, open-standards based Hyperledger Project, Blockchain has the potential to improve regulatory compliance, reduce cost as well as advance trade. Are you curious about how Blockchain is built for business? In her session a...

The cloud provides two major advantages to load and performance procedures that help testing teams better model realistic behavior: instant infrastructure and geographic location. Cloud-based load testing also lowers the total cost of ownership, increases flexibility and allows testers to understand the impact of third-party components. So you’re sold on using the cloud; here’s what you should loo...

The use of containers by developers -- and now increasingly IT operators -- has grown from infatuation to deep and abiding love. But as with any long-term affair, the honeymoon soon leads to needing to live well together ... and maybe even getting some relationship help along the way. And so it goes with container orchestration and automation solutions, which are rapidly emerging as the means to m...

Bitcoins are a digital cryptocurrency and have been around since 2009. As a substitute for legal tender, they are becoming the rage for investors and others but because there is no government agency auditing or performing regulatory oversights, you wonder if it is the perfect breeding ground for electronic nano crime. Since the introduction of the Bitcoin, some competitors have emerged and the who...

From manual human effort the world is slowly paving its way to a new space where most process are getting replaced with tools and systems to improve efficiency and bring down operational costs. Automation is the next big thing and low code platforms are fueling it in a significant way.
The Automation era is here. We are in the fast pace of replacing manual human efforts with machines and process...

You know you need the cloud, but you’re hesitant to simply dump everything at Amazon since you know that not all workloads are suitable for cloud. You know that you want the kind of ease of use and scalability that you get with public cloud, but your applications are architected in a way that makes the public cloud a non-starter. You’re looking at private cloud solutions based on hyperconverged in...

Making informed network investment decisions about emerging technologies such as network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) can help evolve the network to keep pace with the innovations of the devices and people it’s connecting. As you work with business leaders to make decisions about upgrading your infrastructure with these networking developments, it’s important...

Imagine if you will, a retail floor so densely packed with sensors that they can pick up the movements of insects scurrying across a store aisle. Or a component of a piece of factory equipment so well-instrumented that its digital twin provides resolution down to the micrometer.

Is advanced scheduling in Kubernetes achievable?Yes, however, how do you properly accommodate every real-life scenario that a Kubernetes user might encounter? How do you leverage advanced scheduling techniques to shape and describe each scenario in easy-to-use rules and configurations? In his session at @DevOpsSummit at 21st Cloud Expo, Oleg Chunikhin, CTO at Kublr, answered these questions and de...

Cloud computing budgets worldwide are reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, and no organization can survive long without some sort of cloud migration strategy. Each month brings new announcements, use cases, and success stories.